Discovery of the most accelerated binary pulsar

Fifty years after Jocelyn Bell discovered the first pulsar, students are no longer going through reams of paper from pen chart recorders but instead search through 1,000s of terabytes of data to find these enigmatic pulsating radio stars. The most extreme binary pulsar system so far, with accelerations of up to 70 g has been discovered by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn. At their closest approach the orbit of the pulsar and its companion neutron star would easily fit inside the radius of the Sun. […]Read More